Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Cyborg Camp Toronto

I blogged a couple of months ago about launching Cyborg Camp here in Toronto, and I'm here to report now that it actually happened last weekend! We had about 40 people gathered at Tranzac, the Toronto Australian New Zealand club, to talk about cyborgs, augmentation, transhumanism, AI, hackerspaces, all that kind of good stuff. I really enjoyed myself, and several other people told me they did as well, so I'm counting it as a huge success! I certainly learned a lot about how to put together an event and how much work it actually is - although an unconference is less work than a real conference, it's still many hours and days of work! I especially enjoyed the "libraries and hackerspaces" session, and the telepresence robotics session, and the ethics of duplicating people session. We're planning to do Cyborg Camp again next year here in Toronto, likely in the fall again, but long before then I plan to start up a cyborg/H+ discussion group, which will be a lot of fun. Anyway, thanks to everyone who came to Cyborg Camp, and thanks especially to my co-organizers Jen & Alan. Check out the flickr set: Cyborg Camp Toronto.

World Maker Faire

I travelled via Greyhound to New York City for the World Maker Faire, as usual it was a total blast. I hung out with my friends from San Francisco there, and I checked out the entire faire over the course of two days (not running your own booth is totally rad because it means that you have time to see everybody else's!). Some of my favorite things: the 3D printing village was AWESOME this year, with a new dual-print head Maker Bot, the Ultimaker, and pretty rad 3D printed art (especially by Shane Hope), and Christophers 3D printed laser chess was also quite a hit. Another favorite was the HUGE metal fire-breathing dragon, presumably it was art car for burning man, it totally impresses. And I loved the white-string-based 3D projection stuff in the dark room, that was totally rad. Finally, I have to mention the "bullet time" polaroid camera ring, that thing was incredible. Imagine 20 polaroid cameras mounted on a ring and facing inward. You stand in the center, all the camera's take a shot at the same time, and the resulting photos are assembled into a little flip book "bullet time" movie of you, travelling 360 degrees around you. Awesome! There are so many more projects I could mention, but how about instead you check out my complete flickr set of the World Maker Faire.